Nice setup! 👍 Cool that the hard drive came back to life, was it a 10MB Seagate?

I've seen there are a few apps that let you do a couple of dual monitor tasks if you have both CGA and MDA cards, think Lotus 123 was one of them, what did you try with the dual monitors on this ATI card?

Always great to see another historical machine up and running again

CC-Adam wrote on 2026-06-03, 07:56:

Nice setup! 👍 Cool that the hard drive came back to life, was it a 10MB Seagate?

I've seen there are a few apps that let you do a couple of dual monitor tasks if you have both CGA and MDA cards, think Lotus 123 was one of them, what did you try with the dual monitors on this ATI card?

Thanks!
Yes, it has the original 10 MB Seagate ST-412 in it.
I was just curious to see what happens if VGA and MDA are connected at the same time. There was no motive behind it, only curiosity.
The MDA monitor did not get a signal.
With this videocard it takes a bit of time for the MDA monitor to get a signal. Maybe I will try by attaching the VGA after I have an MDA output.

In the next couple of weeks an FPU (Intel 8087-1) will arrive and thinking of adding a mouse later.
I want to try SimCity, this game can use the FPU. Few games used it in this era.
Stunt Track Racer from 1989 is another one. This being a racer game I might do a "benchmark" with the original AMD 4,77MHz CPU and FPU ON and OFF.
Grand Prix Circuit cannot use FPU and runs quite badly (~7-10FPS), but it is still fun!
Oh, and since the IBM 5151 monitor has a very high persistence the whole game was green smear on this monitor... and this was state of the art back in 1983.
How far we evolved with 1000Hz refresh and 0,1ms response OLED monitors.

Yeah best game playing mode back in the day was to turn your lights off and turn the brightness all the way down on the monitor for less smear.

Excellent, I would like to see Sim City on there! Will it be even remotely playable, even with the FPU? I have a 5160 I might need to give it a try I've been wanting an excuse to dig it out again. Don't have a co-processor for it though (yet!...)

JAKra85 wrote on 2026-05-24, 21:33:

Today I brought it down, did a clean, disassembled made photos, reassembled. Changed the videocard to ATi Wonder 1024 - ISA - 51 […]
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Today I brought it down, did a clean, disassembled made photos, reassembled.
Changed the videocard to ATi Wonder 1024 - ISA - 512KB (PN 109-00095-10).
One of the fastest videocards possible from ATi (28800-5) for this CPU.
This is a 16b ISA working in 8b ISA mode.
The PC Tools program reports only 256KB RAM on the videocard, not exactly sure why that is.
Has both VGA and EGA outputs.
(Tried IBM 5151 monitor and an LCD at the same time, does not work. 😜 )

Hi, it might be that PC-Tools Deluxe from the 80s checks for full 256 KB or less.
256 KB was the full expansion for EGA cards and the base memory for VGA cards.
So the register in memory can't tell if its 512 KB or 1 MB.
Other programs might report "256 KB/512KB" instead.
Merely VGA aware programs do really count the video memory, I think.

https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/Manufacturers/at … vga_wonder+.php

I was just curious to see what happens if VGA and MDA are connected at the same time. There was no motive behind it, only curiosity.
The MDA monitor did not get a signal.
With this videocard it takes a bit of time for the MDA monitor to get a signal. Maybe I will try by attaching the VGA after I have an MDA output.

This works just fine, if two cards for each monitor is used.
VGA and MDA can co-exist, an MDA monitor was often used by developers to see debugger output (SoftICE, Windows etc).
Things is, there are two types of MDA cards.
Real MDA cards with 4 KB of RAM and MGA (Hercules, HGC) cards with 64 KB of RAM.

But because Hercules cards do boot up as plain MDA cards, as well, they cause no trouble.
Programs like Checkit will merely see a plain MDA card in short.
It needs a driver or utility to enable the graphics RAM (Hercules driver disk, msherc driver etc).

If other graphics cards can be used in graphics mode or not is up to the VGA BIOS.
It has to be smart enough to decide if the VGA card makes room for another graphics card.
If it makes room, the VGA card looses some of its video modes.

Edit: Two monitors on one VGA card may or may not work.
I vaguely remember that some VGA cards from late 80s (ATI?) had "auto-sense" and would try to detect the monitor type.